Courts and the prevention of abuse:

the need for decisions in a child’s timeframe and the human challenges of

achieving thisChris Beckett, Jonathan Dickens, Sue Bailey

Centre for Research on Children and Families, University of East Anglia

This paper draws on an evaluation of a pilot project in three London boroughs (the

‘Tri-borough’ authorities), carried out by Prof Jonathan Dickens, Sue Bailey and

Chris Beckett, which had the aim of reducing the length of care proceedings to 26

weeks, in advance of nationwide moves in the same direction.

The emphasis here is on the psychological aspects of court delay and of setting

time limits, considering the impact on the children, parents and professionals

involved.

Setting limits to the length of care proceedings is now enshrined in English law by the

2014 Children and Families Act.

Is this an instance of ‘target culture’, and a step backwards from Eileen Munro’s

recommendations for the child protection system?

Actually, this is an issue that doesn’t really lend itself to the binary opposition, now

traditional in the social work literature…

Concern about court delay does not come solely from a managerialist desire for efficiency, but out of a concern that overly cumbersome decision-making processes might be harmful to the children they were supposed to be protecting.

Sometimes themselves a form of system abuse? Subjecting children to lengthy periods of uncertainty, without a secure long-term attachment figure…

Goldstein, Freud and Solnit (1980):

‘Procedural and substantive decisions should never exceed the time that the child-to-be-placed can endure loss and uncertainty’.

While we associate targets and rigid time limits with bureaucratic systems, it is important to remember that delay itself is an equally well-known characteristic of such systems.

Isabel Menzies-Lyth observed of the nurses in her study that ‘all decisions are . . . necessarily attended by some uncertainty as to their outcome and consequently by some conflict and anxiety … [which] is likely to be acute if a decision affects the treatment and welfare of patients’ (1960, p. 104), and that this anxiety was addressed, among other ways, by ‘a common practice of checking and rechecking decisions for validity and postponing action as long as possible’ (1960, p. 104).

Court delay may (in part) also be a defence against anxiety:

pushing painful and anxiety-inducing decisions from the present into the future, or from one professional to another,

creating the illusion that uncertainty might be eliminated altogether at some future point.

This is not to say, however, that overly rigid time limits cannot also be

harmful to children. Care proceedings have exceptionally far-reaching

consequences and a decision of this magnitude will properly take some

time.

Here is the dilemma, both thoroughness and speed are important! (As the

children’s focus group members told us).

Our evaluation of the Triborough pilot

The Tri-borough local authorities in London, established a pilot programme in collaboration with the local courts and Cafcass to try to reduce the duration of care proceedings cases to 26 weeks ahead of the change of law.

The pilot ran from April 2012 to March 2013. We carried out an evaluation.

The Tri-borough authorities had maintained a database of all 90 cases, comprising 124 children and young people, whose cases went through the courts in the pilot year.

At our request the three local authorities compiled from their records a comparator database containing the same information about the cases that had passed through the courts in the preceding year, to allow comparisons to be made between the two years.

We also carried out semi-structured interviews with 21 professionals involved in care proceedings. In addition 2 focus groupsOne compromising two court legal advisers and another district judgeOne with members of the one of the borough’s Children in Care council, to obtain their views on the principles underlying the pilot and the issues it was intended to address

The median duration of care proceedings was reduced by 45%.

But was this reduction sustainable, and had it been achieved at a cost?

We saw three kinds of danger here:1)Delay might simply be pushed back to an earlier stage. As far as we could establish, this had not occurred. 2)Delay might be pushed on to the post-court period. Whether this occurred or not could not be established conclusively without further follow-up. 3)shorter hearings might be achieved by making over-hasty decisions based on insufficient evidence: speed at the expense of justice and thoroughness.

An encouraging finding was that, while many of our interviewees had had anxieties about whether the pilot project’s drive for shorter proceedings would compromise thoroughness and justice, none of them believed that either had been compromised in fact (yet!) .

I didn’t leave any case thinking, ‘Oh my God, these parents really haven’t had a fair crack of the whip here’. (Children’s Guardian)

But, as a team manager observed:

‘It’s relatively easy to make something work for a short period of time’

There were a number of factors which meant that the pilot experience was a somewhat exceptional one. For one thing, the three boroughs are among the better resourced local authorities in England.

And pilots are exciting, they make their participants feel special, and people tend to feel empowered and supported.

The views of participants were surprisingly diverse on the question of whether the pilot had added or subtracted from staff workloads in terms of hours.

(Social workers, for instance, probably took more time on writing initial reports under the pilot than they would have previously done, but they and the other participants would have had fewer court hearings to attend.)

However, what does seem clear is that that more effort was needed to work in this new way, sometimes also described by participants in terms of being ‘strong’ or ‘robust’ or having ‘energy’. It involved a sustained effort that could prove exhausting in the long-run.

One of the reasons that a more focused and intense approach feels effortful, is that it requires directly confronting one’s own anxieties and those of others about the decision to be made.

(‘Ego depletion’: effort is also a finite resource)

Decisions should ideally be both quick and thorough. It’s important that both speed and thoroughness are monitored: the latter by looking at measures such as post-court timescales, breakdown rates, measures of child well-being, which should be compared with those from the pre-26 week era.

Our evaluation of the Tri-borough pilot suggests that there are grounds for hope that the difficult combination of speed and thoroughness may actually be possible.

But this is only likely to be sustainable if the anxiety associated with these decisions is properly recognised, and if adequate support systems are put in place for all involved in making them.

This is necessary if professionals anxieties are not going to result in unnecessarily distressing experiences for children.

As long as the adult quest for certainty continues, the child must necessarily be left in a

state of uncertainty. Only when the adults relinquish the hope of absolute certainty and

come to a judgement, can the child’s state of uncertainty hope to end.

Report and articles about the evaluation:

Beckett, C., Dickens, J. and Bailey, S. (2013 [updated 2014]) Concluding Care Proceedings within 26 Weeks: Report of the Evaluation of the Tri-borough Care Proceedings Pilot, Centre for Research on Children and Families, University of East Anglia. Available at: http://www.uea.ac.uk/centre-research-child-family/child-protection-and-family-support/evaluation-of-the-tri-borough-care-proceedings-pilot

Beckett, C. and Dickens, J. (2014) ‘Delay and anxiety in care proceedings: grounds for hope?’ Journal of Social Work Practice, 28(3), 371-382.

Dickens, J., Beckett, C., and Bailey, S. (2014) ‘Justice, speed and thoroughness in child protection court proceedings: Messages from England’ Children and Youth Services Review, 46, 103-111

Key background texts

Goldstein, J., Freud, A. and Solnit, A. (1980) Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, Burnett Books, London.

Menzies-Lyth, I. (1960) ‘A case-study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety: a report on a study of the nursing service of a general hospital’, Human Relations, 13, pp. 95-121.